From Media to Medium: Claiming a Stake for RPGs

By J.S. Majer

In which the author discusses the question 'is it
art'?

Is a role playing game art? A daft question if there ever was
one, but a useful target. The first thing the question hits is a
version of the dictionary paradox, "Rimmer's Opening Paragraph,"
for you Red Dwarf fans out there. To answer the initial question, a
series of questions must be asked: what is art, what is a game,
what is a role, what is play, what is a role playing game –
and each of those questions results in more questions so that an
answer to the initial question can never be brought to bear.

The worst of them all is the question about what art is. Being a
grubby member of the intelligentsia, I break the bottle on the bar
when someone says, "What is art, anyway?" and get ready for the
scrum. Words like that are asking for trouble. It is especially
troublesome since they tend to draw in all manner of lumpy minds,
since everyone can talk about it. So Dr. Rotwang! calls out
slight imprecations upon the subtle definitions of the black
turtleneck brigade. Well, just consider me the avenger of the
"Village Yahoos."

As I understand it, back in the early days of Hollywood, the
notion of whether a movie could be art was in doubt as well. It was
a secondary question to whether the medium had any longevity in it,
or even money. The relevance of this to the topic at hand comes in
the way the editors thought about things. Editors certainly did not
see what they did as art. Editing was a task, a skill, and a job
that they did. It was a craft, a profession that involved a certain
kind of skill, and many actually resented the idea that they were
artists. They considered themselves only tradesmen. They were not
even called editors, but instead "cutters," as that was what they
did: cut film. This term later acquired derogatory overtones, so be
mindful of how you bandy it about.

Now, did movie editing have any less art to it than it would
acquire later on? Perhaps, but to an important degree the answer is
no. And did editing have any less skill to it when it became
considered an art form? Don't answer that in the affirmative if
there are any editors in the room. Craft and Artistry, Form and
Function; these concepts are Corsican twins: hurt one and you hurt
the other, and they together go with linked hands up the hills of
truth and beauty.

Do I mean to say that, some day, in analogy with the above
story, all those people who deny their games are art are going to
start considering themselves artists? To Hades with the labels!
What matters most is how good your game is. To put it one way, the
best artists have no idea what art is, the worst critics always do.
Far better to not call it art and run a game so beautiful as to
make the gods weep than to call it art and play games that have
more to do with showing off your mastery of tropes and character
than entertainment.

However, this feeds into an important point. A definitive answer
to the question of whether games are art would not do much. If I
conceived the ultimate logical proof stating that role playing
games were art, you would not be moved. Why? Next Saturday you
still have to figure out how you are going make the players meet up
with the prince's dogs, or whether you will finally catch up to
those pirates who took your ship. Even if you knew, you still have
to run or play in a game. And since the correlation between theory
and practice is slim in the least, the basic problem of creating
that good game hangs around like a dead bat.

No, I'm serious. Combine "As I Lay Dying" and "Absolom,
Absolom," switch all the female characters to Phoebe Cates, and
turn it into a song sung by The Bloodhound Gang, and that's Dr.
Rotwang!. Of course, reading me is like reading a bad translation
of a Sanskrit catalogue of humorously obscene pottery. But those
are our "wrists," as they call it in the trade. It's why your
reading this.

"Yet," as I am certain that both of you still reading this are
now thinking, "Dr. Rotwang! has already Faulknerianally pointed out
these things (that's stream of consciousness for those of us who
aren't Village Yahoos. Ed.). He has already written on what we can
get from art. What purpose do you serve in reiteration?" Ah, but I
do not intend for a reiteration, I plan for a further exposition.
While I like his article, I do not like his basic theory.

Dr. Rotwang! has approached the matter with a sheer look to
practicality. Take this, don't take that. Take this movie
convention and this theatrical style, and don't take this bad one.
I do not like practicality. Why is this? I agree with David Thomas
in his article prior
to the Doctor's. Gaming is a matter of its own, and to let it be
too corrupted by other artistic forms is heresy. However, as I am a
theorist, I see more connections.

What makes good playwrights or screenwriters or actors or
directors or storytellers or writers or even painters is the same
as what makes Referees: a mastery of specific technique, plus a
sense of composition. However, artistic forms of all sorts had the
greatest effect on where games are now. This then is my
investigation.

So consider this a genealogy. A genealogy is not a history. If
you want history, well, look at the earlier issues of this
'zine. Instead, it is an attempt to relate gaming to its forebears,
which more often than not were artistic endeavours. Whether or not
they are all art could be debated, but they were all media, and
they all had an influence. This is not how gaming itself developed,
but what it was that made gaming what it is. I shall be looking at
the roles played by literature, movies, TV and video games.

For more on the notion of camp, see the second helping of
Christopher Kubasik's cool but more-than-slightly dated series,
"The Interactive Toolkit" (currently available on the Oracle).

Literature told us what sorts of games would be played. May the
probabilities bless you, Prof. Tolkien. Fiction gave us worlds, or
the seeds of worlds, on which the bare bones of function could be
hung. Fiction gave us ideas, and inspired our already extant ideas.
But also we must examine what sorts of fiction were chosen. It was
always, or almost always, genre fiction as it is derisively called:
sci-fi, horror, fantasy, etcetera. Most genre fiction has its roots
in the world of pulp fiction. Pulp fiction was cheaply produced,
wholly gratuitous stories that generally held little so-called
artistic merit although as camp they possessed a worth of their
own. I suspect that it is from pulp fiction that we get such
notions as the "adventure," as well as the notion that adventures
were supposed to be strung together in some manner of episodic
structure typically one that centred on a central character or
characters. It also granted us strong notions of good and evil,
although perhaps that would be better seen as a clear protagonist
and equally clear antagonist. It was the creation of a new
symbolism. While some of it came from more ancient precedents like
Homer or Mallory, most of it was fresh, and got sucked up into
RPGs. A four-year old could be read a piece of the story and know
exactly what sides everyone was on. There were just a multitude of
tropes developed over the years regarding who was the central
character and who "wore the red shirt," to be slightly
anachronistic. I do not think the notion of the evil overlord has
ever been quite shaken, and its strongest roots are in the pulps.
There is also an emphasis on combat, and on a specific form of
combat that got taken into RPGs, that I would call the "swarms of
minions" approach, think the old Batman ("In color!!!") television
show. Finally, there are the campy attitudes of gaming that have
never been quite shaken. I get shivers whenever I see an
anatomically violate painting by Boris "how does she stand?"
Vallejo. Larry Elmore, despite some people's strong protests to the
contrary, is not much better. It is not only a matter of
broad-shoulders and buxomness, but a matter of convention and
stereotype. Why would you go into a melee battle wearing nothing
but a loincloth? Why does every wizard have a beard, regardless of
its length or color, and excepting for "the young apprentice"? Why
is everyone white? Answers to such questions lie in campy genre
fiction and unthinking racist, sexist and agist attitudes more
common in the 50's morality.

Television and the cinema had similar effects. Most movies that
got gamer attention were rather pulpy, and so created the same
sorts of influence as the pulps before. Both media, after all, were
taking about as many cues from the pulps as gaming was. They opened
up more genera to more people, thus giving more people more
impetuous to game. The difference rests in the matter of scale.
Putting aside any dismay at the death of literacy aside, the fact
that they could be consumed with much more ease opened up more
people to the realms that genre fiction had carved out.

And don't even begin to consider the "artist intention"
aspect of this; that's another fight altogether.

Pulp fiction, for all its virtues, never (with notable
exceptions) considered itself mainstream. It never tried for it.
There was an audience, and the audience was kept sated. Movies
were, or became after two extremely successful pieces of genre
fiction big-ticket mass-culture items (Star Wars and Jaws for you
cultural trivia types). Television did this too, but the ways that
it made a mono-culture are slightly different in character. By
their epic natures, movies had more of a story to tell. Those
stories have stuck with us, within our minds and in our culture.
We, all of us, know very well what to expect from a interstellar
empire and those expectations play out in our games. Even when they
are not met, the gap between the expectations and their fulfilment
is important because our ideas are being challenged. The absence of
a fulfilment makes the aberrance stand out even more. Take
Traveller for instance. Due to Star Wars…well, and
Christianity, empire means evil empire. Most people do not even
know what an empire is other than evil. Yet, in the Traveller
universe, the Imperium is neutral if not good, and just as ho-hum
as any other form of interstellar government. Thus the expectation
has been blown.

The stories in movies provided one important set of templates as
to how a story in a game should go, and what it should be about.
Television achieved this as well, but in a different sort of way.
Television lent its episodic structure to games. Pulps may have had
this aspect, but the role of television is more persuasive by its
greater spread, but also because of its limits. A book can and will
be as long as it needs to be, especially since the authors of the
pulps were being paid by the word. A television program has a
specific limit of time, and episode, fixed within another limit of
time, the season. There is no coincidence that these two things
relate closely to session and campaign. However, games had more
power than television programs, not being limited to such a
specific period of time. In fact, it could be argued that each
individual session of a game has more to do with a movie's
structure, the play out of themes beyond a single session fits well
within television.

Television's role may now be changing. Well, perhaps not
changing, but there was one event that absolutely changed things
for RPGs, and that is Babylon 5. Now, I've only seen one
season of this show so I'm no expert, but the day that I heard Mike
Pondsmith (the R. Talsorian head man) going on about it and how
wonderful the plot arc concept was, I knew there was going to be
trouble. Nowadays, it is damnably hard to find a game that does not
have a plot arc (or meta-plot as these young kids are calling it)
of some sort. In fact, it is equally hard to find a television
series that does not have one of these running though it.

I do not see any ways that theater has influenced RPGs, not
greatly at least. The physicality of theater tends to frighten off
most gamers. It is a whole different sort of acting found in the
theater, where one must not merely intellectually be the character
in question, but also be the physical avatar of the character. In
fact, I would tentatively argue that we have done more for theater
than it has for us. After all, we have at least introduced many
more to the notion of playing a character, and experience in doing
so. On the other hand, some of the best players that I've had were
of the crossbreed type. In fact, that may be part of the problem,
that the notions of RPGs and of theatrical production are so
implicitly similar in tone. After all, how many times have you
heard the definition of RPGs as "acting with rules?" Certainly
theater encouraged the LARP movement, as a LARP, no matter the
variety, is awfully close to theater, to the point of them being
indistinguishable at some times.

The most important influence nowadays is video games; games that
RPGs helped define in the first place. RPGs did not necessarily
create video games, but they did change how they developed. There
is even a genera of video games called RPGs, which we all know has
about as little to do with an actual RPG as chickens do to monkeys.
I do mean video games or platform games as opposed to computer
games. It is more about Space Invaders than King's Quest. While the
latter may have opened up the field for the former, it was the
former that ended up being more important. Video games had the
advantage of being more common, due to their lower entry cost, and
were forced to be simpler by nature. Video games took a lot of the
RPG conventions: dungeons, level based character development, and
so on, redefining them all the while admittedly their development
was close together, but the notion of conventions is key. Character
may be obvious, a logical mutual development. That there were
different fantasy races, or that wizards must rest to regain
spells, perhaps they could have been taken from some of the mutual
artistic forebears. But the notion that those things were so highly
codified, with specific rules governing them, is a role playing
game notion. Still, there are a host of other little things, like
Trolls regenerating or spellcasters being unable to use serious
weaponry, that can only have their roots in our field.

Now that video games have become their own thing, the influences
are returned. I've heard people say in games, "this must be the
level boss," or "wait a minute, hit save, hit save," and so on. But
the biggest sign of this I see in the new edition of D&D. Now,
I will admit, I have only a cursory knowledge of the rules for 3E
as I have yet to work a deep examination, but what I have seen
points in this direction. The most egregious is one of the new
notions of the way that level and class interrelate. That there are
certain classes that open up when a character achieves different
levels in several is as old as 1E. However, the new rules make it
more far more common and palatable, and include the idea that some
exist that the makers have not told you about. More than just a
simple way to get more supplements out, it has that wonderfully
video game-ish notion of hidden abilities if you do the right
things.

So what of it? What is the point? Part of it was a desire on my
part to make my own addition to the argument about games and media,
but, as you must wonder, the article is not about that question. It
must use that question, however. I have enumerated the ways that
art has changed us, has changed what it means to be a gamer and the
ways that games themselves run. What I seek to propose is the
discovery of the next logical step for role playing games to
take.

There is one immense way that art and gaming are similar, and
this transcends the mechanical facts I have already cited. Games
and art are at their best when being reflective. Art, at its
finest, has so much more to it than beauty. When art is at its best
it not only speaks to mere aesthetics but reaches for something
greater. Now, I am not trying to say what art is, merely what it
does. Be it capturing a zeitgeist or an eloquent assertion of human
truth, or both for that matter, good art achieves this. Art is
powerful when it reflects the culture that it comes from, when it
somehow explains who we are.

The problem that most art has in the current world is a fight
over just whose culture the art represents. Those of us in the
States are suffering the greatest ravages of this as a nation
attempts to force a definition of itself from its art. What does
this have to do with gaming? Games too reflect culture. The most
wonderful example of this comes in the form of the "New School" of
gaming. Anyone who was there may get to brag about it to his or her
children some day. I refer to the great upsurgence of White Wolf.
What is the New School? Just what it is proves hard to nail down,
because it is as much about ideological allegiances than any
specific tenets. Principally, it is the division between story and
character oriented games and those that are not, but also totes
about a categorical rejection of older, more game and numerical
oriented ways. See, it is the New School because it chose to define
itself as such, placing itself against an Old School. It is the New
School because it stressed an gap of ideals as to what had gone on
before.

Is White Wolf, a long decade since its original strides, still
New School? Yes, because as long as the gaming populace still
divides itself along these party lines the schools still count for
something. Until one is swept away completely or another
significant division appears, they still are the New School, or are
its standard bearer at least. Who cares about a bunch of Goths? Let
me tell you why you should care.

Games have always had an important aspect of popularism to them,
that is to say, the power to appeal on a most generic level. This
is furthered by the fact that each game is an instrument in and of
itself. Two people could both play Star Frontiers and have
completely different experiences of what that game was like, simply
because so much depends on the Referee and the players. But the
archetype of what a game should consist of was still the way it had
already been. Certainly there were games that broke the rules.
Amber was diceless. Pendragon was severe in its story emphasis. Yet
such games were a subculture of a subculture. A rulebook was a
rulebook, and picking up a new one you still had a very good notion
of how it was going to read, how it was going to be designed.

White Wolf did not change that last point, not entirely anyway.
There are ways but rulebook taxonomy is not my forte. What they did
manage to do was to have their own little folk revolution. They
viciously broke the rules about who was supposed to be playing RPGs
and what sorts of foci those games were to have. For instance,
while all good Referees before had the notion that there really
were no unbreakable rules, to enshrine that rule as White Wolf's
Golden Rule was meant to change the way that people thought about
why and what they were playing. More importantly, unlike the other
adventurous games that had come out, White Wolf knew where its
doggie treats were coming from. They did not just bank on a
revolutionary idea - revolutionary ideas had been banked on before
- they banked on a subculture. Suddenly there was a game that was
by Goths and for Goths. White Wolf teamed up with a growing
subculture, and broke the stranglehold of the old subculture of
gaming. This allowed them many liberties to do things that were not
done before, and we are blessed to have had some wise souls on the
helm. Of course nowadays they themselves have become the
establishment that is rallied against, but that is a tale that has
yet to fully play out. Games now had to all grow as games; since
someone had proved that a big idea could work in ways that no one
had expected possible.

We, as Steve has pointed out, would not have
all these arguments about story and narrative and so on if not for
White Wolf. And the change in semantics between "role/roll playing"
and "storytelling/gaming" is drastically important. The notion
enshrined in "roll playing" is that it is some sort of deviation
from a mean of what we all do, role playing. To say there is an
essential difference between storytelling and gaming marks a far
greater split. So many things have changed, and the reason why they
have changed is only partially due to the fact that the notions
that White Wolf brought with them were new and revolutionary, but
largely due to the fact that they knew how to interact with the
world at large. They knew the way to formulate their New School to
be immensely attractive, one relevant to a large group of people in
the way that other games that could have been the harbingers of the
New School, had not. They knew it took more than a good idea, but
also a manifesto.

So, brothers and sisters know of your origins. Discern how your
games are to be articles of the now, as opposed to the relics from
which we came. We have a long history and the new trick is to see
how to live past those origins. There are ideas for games out there
that are revolutionary, but just publishing a game in the genre of
"Victorian Undersea Fantasy" will not cut muster anymore. The ideas
that we need now do not derive from art, but are ideas that are
wholly appropriate for the times we are living in now. The trick is
to find them. And that is the finest thing that we can draw from
the other arts that surround us. It is not a concrete piece of
advice, but a metaphorical way of seeing the world.

It may be that you think that all art nowadays is dribble. Other
than doubting your claim's veracity, all I can say is that your
game will never have the brilliance of a well-timed game. It is
not, for instance, that science fiction is the "next big thing",
but there is an expression of a science fiction game that is wholly
appropriate and necessary for the way that we live now. It could be
a science fiction or urban fantasy or post-apocalyptic game; or
perhaps it does rest in a single genre, but that is not what is
important. It is that there is a way of expressing that genre that
fits with who we are as humans, living in the world that we do live
in now. And it is our duty, either as designers or as Referees to
forge and as players and critics to support, that vision.